Foreshadowing in Flannery O Connors A Good Man Is Hard to Find Essays

Foreshadowing in Flannery O' Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" Flannery O' Connor, a native of Georgia was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. As a strict Catholic, O' Connor often displayed a sense of spiritual corruption within the characters in most of her stories. One of O' Connor's famous stories, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," reveals the image of spiritual deficiency inherent in the characters which foreshadowed a bloody end. The grandmother communicated the warning of the Misfit, but her activities itself were various signs of foreshadowing of the end approaching. The grandmother warned about the Misfit in the first paragraph of the story: "`Here this fellow calls himself the Misfit is loose from the federal pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people.'" This was the first sign of an obvious foreshadowing element at the start of the story which was ignored by everybody, even by the messenger herself. On the day of the trip to Florida, the grandmother was the first one to be in the car and also dressed very nicely with: `.....a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet.' People usually are found to be dressed in their best outfits and especially found carrying flowers at the time of their death. In reality, it would not be necessary to wear very decent clothing for the purpose of going on a long trip. Next, the place where the family was traveling through had elements which were predicting the doom foretold in the ... ...hing wrong, but still she had to suffer death just like Jesus did. His statement was a statement with a hidden sense of foreshadowing concerning the grandmother's murder. The grandmother begged the Misfit for mercy and told him, "`I'll give you all the money I've got!'" His reply was, "`There never was a body that give the undertaker a tip,'" which was his way of foreshadowing her near death. Thus, Flannery O'Connor used strong imagery to provide foreshadowing to her readers of the inevitable ending of her "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." She first gave her readers a taste of the ending by mentioning the behavior and activities of the characters and also by describing the place of the family's last place of visit on earth, which built her readers' curiosity. Her foreshadowing images are both strong and obscure so as not to spoil the surprising ending of the story.